Discussions of globalization share one similarity – an inability to decide
what the term means. In the absence of definition, commentators rely on
description. Globalization reveals its true nature in the credit crunch, or
the growth of international civil society, or the Nepalese Maoists who
mythologize their rebellions in the language of New York hip hop artists. It
could denote American cultural and economic imperialism. Or, for the more
hopeful, it is the rise of global values and human rights. These
disagreements exist among those who give it credence. Another area of study
devotes itself to denying that the term has any worth. However you approach
it, globalization is a messy idea for an anxious world. Academics worry
about how to define it; protesters worry about how to change it; politicians
wonder how to turn it to their ends.
Differing notions of “choice” underpin these anxieties. Advocates of economic
globalization argue that the increasing inter-connectedness of people,
goods, money and services expands individual possibilities from Birmingham
to Bangalore. But, according to beleaguered central bankers, our current
economic woes are the result of global problems over which national
governments have little or no control. When the global economy surges, free
choice looks limitless. Alternatives tend to vanish when a downturn bites.
David Singh Grewal’s Network Power argues that globalization has made us less
free and attempts a systematic analysis of how this came about. Grewal
understands globalization as a network. It grows and asserts itself
organically, and embraces abstract social norms (privatization,
deregulation, free trade and so on) from which it becomes impossible for
individuals or nations to deviate, even when they are shown to fail.
Grewal’s range is impressive. He offers detailed accounts of how the English
language, the gold standard and neo-liberal economics all, at various times,
rose to international dominance. In each instance, he finds that power grows
because of the increasing size of a network, rather than because of any
intrinsic value. Among Grewal’s case studies Microsoft, which has suffered
anti-trust cases, is the odd one out. International institutions – in this
case the EU – can pronounce on whether a corporation has breached
competition rules. But if a small nation-state decides that the social norms
of an international institution, for example the World Trade Organization,
work against it, the “choice” is often stark: acceptance or isolation.
The New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman praised the modern, wired
networks of globalized trade and finance as a “golden straitjacket” which
binds governments to the more rational decisions of the market. Grewal looks
back to the Enlightenment to trace the processes that wove such strictures.
It was then, he suggests, that “sociability” triumphed over “sovereignty”.
Adam Smith argued that the aggregated wisdom of men acting freely in the
marketplace produced better economic decisions than any elected assembly
could. However, he tempered his praise for the invisible hand of the market
with an insistence that essential public goods required strong government.
The title of his major work – The Wealth of Nations – provides an indication
of the importance he ascribed to national self-determination. Many of
Smith’s supporters, particularly the 1980s Chicago variety, erased these
qualifications to suit their experiments with Latin American economies.
Grewal practises his own elisions in order to imply that, since Smith,
economic practice has proceeded by drift, not design. He singles out free
trade as a particularly bad idea – “less a formula for global peace than an
effective means of amassing wealth for the next war”. But he risks aping his
opposition by providing a grand narrative that lumps all supporters of
international economic cooperation into the same neo-liberal camp.
This is an expansive and thoughtful book, but, too often, it rephrases old
arguments without acknowledging ideological allegiances. Grewal’s diagnosis
of globalization’s problems is clear, but his solutions are vague. He
imagines, for example, that “global alliances could destabilize oppressive
social relations” but then worries that this would represent only “more
sociability to counter sociability”. Global alliances of NGOs and civil
society organizations do not live up to the type of sovereignty that Grewal
favours. They represent “voluntarism” – political choice without a
democratic mandate. The implied alternative is a retreat from international
politics, but he does not suggest how this withdrawal might occur or work.
His own beliefs seem to marry Rousseau’s concept of the General Will to a
neo-Keynesian belief in “national self-sufficiency”. Given these ideological
tastes, one wonders whether he would support state-owned, planned economies
at the national level. He also fails to consider whether a new era of
nationalism might already have begun. The time of the “Washington Consensus”
has passed. The growth of Brazil, China and India (in defiance of many of
the “social norms” regarding free trade) and the renewed belligerence of
Russia indicate a more complex landscape than the orthodoxy that he attacks.
Grewal dismisses concerns about cultural globalization: “in the midst of
profound and wide-reaching global integration at all levels, we have been
reduced to worrying about the menu at Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in
China and analysing the pop lyrics of global youth culture”. J. MacGregor
Wise’s Cultural Globalization sticks exactly to that formula. Grewal argues
that globalization cements uneven power relations and eliminates individual
choice; MacGregor Wise’s meander through music and youth culture offers a
vision of a free global sweet shop, in which fashionable kids can pick and
mix their identities. Theoretical jargon flows freely. Individuals
“re-territorialize” their societies and power relations break down in
“liminal” cultural spaces. MacGregor Wise prefaces these “re-imaginings”
with the assertion that only cultural globalization concerns him. But the
exclusion of economics does not work. Are Korean teenagers in hip hop
clothing really challenging fundamental aspects of their culture, or simply
satisfying niche market demographics? MacGregor Wise insists that
individuals personalize the dominant culture. He is more convincing when,
occasionally, his banal optimism falters. A comparison of the manner in
which the music press elevates certain types of “world music” with British
colonial approval of the Indian caste system provides a rare moment of
originality.
Grewal and MacGregor Wise describe globalization. Two further books suggest
what should be done about the inequalities it produces. A collection of
essays, Critical Mass, imagines the “emergence of a global civil society”,
which, on this evidence, would be a terrible thing. NGOs and charities have
achieved remarkable successes in recent years, such as the Millennium
Development Goals, a ban on landmines and the establishment of an
International Criminal Court. However, it is quite ridiculous to suggest
that they might constitute a third “superpower”, after the US and
multinational companies.
Membership of civil society organizations has swelled as political party
membership and voter turnout have declined. People engage less when they
sense that no real alternatives are on offer. The danger in this, as
suggested by Grewal’s account of “voluntarism”, is that partisan
organizations will then claim to represent the masses instead. Calling on
the one hand for the global system to be “democratized” does not sit well
with arguing for greater power for organizations, purely on the basis of
their self-assessed expertise. Many NGOs aim to represent voiceless parts of
the world in organizations, like the UN, to which they would otherwise have
no link. In itself, that is commendable, but it has nothing to with
democracy, let alone “global governance”. The 26,000 international NGOs
apparently now in operation cannot all have a seat at the table. One article
calling for a greater supervisory role for NGOs over international
institutions reflects the error of thinking that the existing global
bureaucracy might be redeemed by one more layer.
In From Poverty to Power Duncan Green, head of research for Oxfam, offers a
panoramic take on the politics and problems of development. His subtitle –
“How active citizens and effective states can change the world” –
demonstrates a commitment to finding practical solutions. He agrees with
Grewal that democratically elected nation-states should be the key actors in
addressing global problems, from poverty to climate change and HIV. Green
argues that the dogma of economic growth must be replaced by an essential
focus on “human security”. The route out of poverty requires not only
property rights and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, but also
entitlements to a living wage, literacy and access to information. He is
particularly persuasive in pointing out the link between education and
so-called acts of God. When hurricanes hit Cuba, few die because the social
communicative structures allow information to spread quickly. By contrast,
countless lives would have been saved in Asia if more had known that the
retreat of the sea foretold a tsunami.
Green writes that “development is not only about individual freedom of choice,
but also about making difficult choices at the collective level”. This means
that nation-states must be allowed to determine their own course.
Paradoxically, the Asian “emerging economies” held up by neo-liberals as the
poster children of globalization grew their economies behind large tariff
barriers and protected their infant industries from global competition.
Green pleads that developing countries should be allowed the same “policy
space” to develop at their own pace, rather than undergo forced
liberalization at the behest of the WTO. Given the recent failure to
conclude the Doha “development” deal, driven by poor countries’ refusal to
relinquish some measures of agricultural protection, his wish may well be
granted.
The inspiring case studies, drawn mainly from Oxfam’s fieldwork, emphasize
that positive change generally comes from below. Development aid works when
it feeds into existing community organizations, be they land reformers in
Bolivia or fishing cooperatives in India. The shared insight in Green’s and
Grewal’s vastly different books is that no one should accept the
inevitability or the wisdom of the status quo. But in order to act on that
insight, individuals and states must be allowed the freedom to
self-organize; to cherry-pick from the disparate patterns of trade, finance
and culture, and not swallow whole the received wisdom of civil society or
international institutions. In 1933, John Maynard Keynes wrote that
Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel – these are the things which
should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever
it is reasonably and conveniently possible and, above all, let finance be
primarily national. Yet, at the same time, those who seek to disembarrass a
country of its entanglements should be very slow and wary. It should not be
a matter of tearing up roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a
different direction.
That practice of national horticulture now looks resurgent. Globalization
brings connections, but no convergence towards consensus.
David Singh Grewal
NETWORK POWER
The social dynamics of globalization
416pp. Yale University Press. £18 (US $30).
978 0 300 11240 5
J. MacGregor Wise
CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION
A user’s guide
192pp. Wiley-Blackwell. £15.99 (US $24.95).
978 0 631 23539 2
James W. St G. Walker and Andrew S. Thompson, editors
CRITICAL MASS
The emergence of global civil society
330pp. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. £21.99 (US $36.95).
978 1 55458 022 4
Duncan Green
FROM POVERTY TO POWER
How active citizens and effective states can change the world
540pp. Oxfam Publishing. £15.99 (US $29.95).
978 0 855 98593 6
Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London. He is currently
completing a research project at the University of London on globalization.
